Citrus Valley football rallies behind Nelson Natividad in his battle with leukemia

From left, AJ Sorun, 15, Jonathan Belmontes, 15, Chewie Brandtetter, 15, Ian Rocha, 15, and Gavin Martinez, 14, hold a helmet that displays an orange ribbon for teammate Nelson Natividad, who is currently battling leukemia, on Thursday, September 15, 2016 at Citrus Valley High School in Redlands. The team has come together to raise funds to support Nelson as he battles the disease.

Nelson Natividad is known around Citrus Valley High for having a bright smile and a big heart, and since arriving on the campus in 2015, the Blackhawks sophomore has shown plenty of grit and toughness on the football and rugby fields.

For the past few months, those are all traits that Natividad has relied on more than ever as he fights for his life against leukemia.

“It’s really hard to see one of my friends, who’s still young, hooked up to a bunch of machines,” Citrus Valley sophomore football player Jonathan Belmontes said. “It saddens me because he doesn’t deserve it.”

Natividad suffers from chronic myeloid leukemia, a slowly progressing and uncommon type of blood-cell cancer that begins in the bone marrow. The cancer is in an accelerated phase and Natividad has gone back and forth between the ICU ward and the oncology floor at Loma Linda Children’s Hospital while waiting to undergo a bone marrow transplant.

“He’s just struggling right now,” said Carrie Martinez, a close friend of the Natividad family, which authorized her to speak on its behalf for this story. “He’s had a couple rounds of chemo and radiation, so now it’s kind of just letting him recover and see if it will go into remission.”

Nelson’s parents, Arnel and Sonia, and his older sister Crystal have been juggling their lives and work schedules to make sure at least one of them is by Nelson’s side at all times. But Nelson’s extended family in the community has been very visibly in his corner, as well.

One of the football team’s rallying cries is “No Blackhawk Fights Alone” and Citrus Valley has put that principle into practice in support of Nelson’s cause. His teammates and coaches in the football program have been passionately rooting him on, and not just from the sideline.

Every time the Blackhawks take the field this season, reminders of Nelson will be everywhere. The team will wear orange wristbands and orange ribbon helmet stickers representing leukemia awareness. And over the next two games, the program will participate in the Touchdowns Against Cancer program which collects pledges per touchdown scored to fund cancer research.

Blackhawks coach Pete Smolin has also started a Go Fund Me account to raise money for the Natividad family’s expenses.

As of Monday, behind a groundswell of social media publicity and word of mouth, the online crowd funding effort had raised $4,145 toward its $10,000 goal.

“They’ve allowed me to do the Go Fund Me page and get the word out to the players and the community,” Smolin said of Nelson’s parents. “They’re proud people, but in the same respect, they need a lot of help financially. It’s taking a big toll on them and their insurance is not covering everything.

“(Nelson) was really excited about all the support he’s getting from his friends and teammates and coaches.”

Nelson hadn’t played football before going out for the Blackhawks’ freshman team last year. But he quickly found his niche as a member of the defensive line, and later as a flanker on the school’s rugby club team in the winter.

“He was one of the first guys I met at summer practice and instantly he was one of my favorite friends because he was the kind of guy that was just laid back and chill,” Belmontes said. “He really didn’t care about bad stuff. He just kept a positive attitude and never really had a negative attitude.”

Martinez said Nelson thought he had simply suffered a minor injury in a spring football workout when he started complaining of back pain at the end of the last school year.

It turned out to be the first sign of a much more serious problem, and within a few days, Nelson was admitted to the hospital after being diagnosed with leukemia.

He remained hospitalized for several weeks while starting a program of orally administered chemotherapy, which doctors thought would effectively suppress the illness if he remained on the medication for the next five years. Nelson went home and was doing fine for a while, Martinez said, and even got cleared to return to football just in time for summer practices.

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